Comms Alliance to develop guidelines for end-to-end performance over NBN

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 20 December 2011 12:30

Business IT - Networking

Communications Alliance is planning to develop guidelines for the end-to-end performance of Internet Protocol networks, such as the NBN.

The need for such standards has been identified as a high priority given that, in the NBN world, any end user service will be delivered across at least two networks - the NBN and the retail service provider's - and in many cases three: the NBN the RSP's and that of an intermediate wholesaler of NBN services.

Some industry commentators and analysts have argued that there is major problem looming. In May iTWire reported on a paper just published in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia by Mike Rocke and Kit Wignall - both from telecoms consultancy Gibson Quai AAS.

The warned that the lack of end-to-end QoS over the NBN could cause "the quality of telephone calls to vary significantly and to fall outside the current high standard enjoyed by customers," and "new services that have a high dependency on QoS (such as widely available desk top video conferencing) [to] not be commercially successful due to the risk that the consistency of end to end service quality of these services is not well managed, and therefore does not meet reasonable customer expectations."

In a subsequent edition of the TJA, the Journal's editor Peter Gerrand, argued that a self-regulatory body such as Comms Alliance was not adequately structured to resolve technically complex, generic network service problems, such as end-to-end QoS.

Against this background Communications Alliance CEO, John Stanton, has announced a review two key Communications Alliance guidelines, introduced in 2007, that service providers use to minimise quality-degrading factors such as delay, jitter and packet loss on IP-based services.

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